We apologize to those (few) individuals who were inconvenienced by the
1.3B2 expiration, and hope that you'll do your part to ensure that
you've installed the 1.4 release over all of your 1.4B3 and 1.4 gamma
installations so that we don't have a repeat of these problems on Nov
15. The 1.4 release is now available from ftp.metcard.com:/MetaCard
and ftp.uu.net:/vendor/MetaCard.
While we realized that putting time limits on the betas was a
dangerous proposition, there were two factors that made it necessary.
Firstly, there was the Embedded MetaCard beta test, which required a
time limit since it had to be shipped out free of charge to many
customers who had not purchased it. Since it is *exactly* the same as
the MetaCard engine, the standard engines also required the
time-limiting code (to build Embedded MetaCard otherwise would have
required complicated configuration management, and increased the risk
of having different bugs in the two environments).
Secondly, we get an unbelievably large number of technical support
requests from people using old betas (we got two against 1.3 *alphas*
just last week). To make matters worse, the people who don't upgrade
are the same people who think nothing of calling us up on the phone
and wasting the 10 or 15 minutes of our time it takes just to figure
out what they're even trying to do! Though in many cases the problem
is a newbie who inherited the obsolete installation from someone who
made no effort to ease the transition, we can not and will not waste
our time on this when such a simple solution is available.
Though we are not fond of the beta schemes used by most other software
companies (fill out lots of papers, make lots of commitments), this
is the only viable alternative to putting time limits into widely
distributed betas. We do plan to use less dangerous implementations
(e.g., only time limit use with a Home stack) and also to make the
expiration dates more obvious in the documentation if we put time
limits into the 2.0 beta releases.
I do sympathize with those who have had an engine stop working on
them. I've been burned by this twice myself. The first time was when
the version of QEMM shipped with one of the DESQview/X beta
distributions stopped working unexpectedly, disabling the PC we use
for faxing product information. The second, and more annoying case,
was when the dtksh binary from the first COSE Desktop snapshot stopped
working 3 days before the deadline for the MetaCard/dtksh/Tcl article
I was writing for the X Resource.
We hope that by better design on our part and by diligent upgrading on
your part that can avoid these problems in the future.
Regards,
Scott Raney
PS: You might consider yourselves lucky: time bombs have been much
more inconvenient in other products. For example, the last beta for
Microsoft's Visual C++ for NT stopped working before the product
shipped and before any replacement became available. The dubious
achievement award in this area definitely goes to Adobe, however.
They inadvertently shipped Photoshop 3.0 with a Jan 1, 1995 time bomb
in it (see MacWorld, December 1994, p 33). They're sending a 3.0.1
patch to all registered users, but since registration rates are fairly
low for this type of product, there are going to be a lot of unhappy
campers out there come New Years Day.
-- *********************************************************************** * Scott Raney 303-447-3936 Remember: the better you look, * * raney@metacard.com the more you'll see -- Lidia * ***********************************************************************